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Sunday, 26 August 2012

Neil Armstrong, the moon’s mystery man

"A lot of people couldn't figure out Armstrong."

With those words Tom Wolfe introduced Neil Armstrong, the astronaut
hero of his nonfiction masterpiece, "The Right Stuff." Armstrong, of
course, was a masterpiece himself: the commander of the 1969 Apollo 11
mission and the first man ever to walk on the moon. Armstrong died
Saturday from complications relating to heart surgery. He was 82.

All these decades, Armstrong, the lunar Adam, has represented a code
his admirers knew better than to try to crack. Not that, early on, great
literary minds—besotted by the baby-faced genius—didn't try.
Wolfe continued: "You'd ask him a question, and he would just stare
at you with those pale-blue eyes of his, and you'd start to ask the
question again, figuring he hadn't understood, and— click —out of his
mouth would come forth a sequence of long, quiet, perfectly formed,
precisely thought-out sentences."

So Wolfe warned against understanding Armstrong in "The Right Stuff."
And that warning was more or less heeded, somewhat miraculously, until
Armstrong's dying day. Profilers kept their mitts off him. Hollywood
starlets didn't swoop in to wreck his family. And, most mercifully of
all, Carson and Merv Griffin and Dinah Shore and Ali G and Oprah didn't
demand that he couch-surf with them.

This is astounding. In the 1960s and '70s , the national pastime was
psychologizing postwar celebrities—John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe,
Muhammad Ali. And once a hero is cracked open by one Vanity Fair
profile, the pile-on never ends. This one had a sex addiction; this one
had a chip on her shoulder; this one could never live up to his big
brother.

Let's not do that to Armstrong, Wolfe pleaded. In any case, the great
man simply would not succumb. Armstrong was simply, at heart, not homo
psychologico. He was homo machinator, homo ingeniator. The engineering man.

In an era when everyone was expected to evince the adolescent
emotionality of Marlon Brando or Allen Ginsberg, Armstrong was
resolutely adult and elegantly square. He was a Navy pilot from a small
town who married a home-ec major at Purdue whom he had no recollection
of courting or even proposing to. (Janet Armstrong, with whom he had
three children, evidently didn't remember any courtship either.)

Though astronauts in the time were represented as hard-partying
matinee idols, Armstrong always described himself as a "white-socks,
pocket-protector, nerdy engineer." He wasn't boasting, though engineers
are, of course, the hotshots of today: the hackers and technologists who
keep pushing into the new breach—the postfinal frontiers of cyberspace.

Once in 1969, Norman Mailer bullied Armstrong into saying something—anything—romantic
about going to the moon. (Armstrong would have to cough up the romance,
Mailer wrote, or be considered "a spiritual neuter.") Armstrong stood
his ground like a Buddha. "I think we're going to the moon because it's
in the nature of the human being to face challenges," he said, defying
Mailer. "It's by the nature of his deep inner soul ... We're required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream."
Those words are perhaps the most gorgeous words the press-shy
astronaut ever said, including his famous scripted line about the giant
leap.

Michael Collins, an Apollo 11 crewmate, wrote that Armstrong "never
transmits anything but the surface layer, and that only sparingly ... I
like him, but I don't know what to make of him, or how to get to know
him better."
Maybe we weren't meant to fully understand Armstrong. Only to hold him in awe. Like the moon itself.